Barack Obama

With health-care battle not yet over, Obama must reach out to religious leaders

At the funeral of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in August 2009, Boston’s Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley pulled President Obama aside for a quiet word. It was a sign of things to come: the first failure of the president to understand the moral dimensions of his health-care proposal. The bill that has become known by its opponents as “Obamacare” had not yet been passed …

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“I Want to Be Like Jesus.”

Cornel West is a self-proclaimed prophet who believes in the virtues of love and justice. But in his own life, he can’t seem to find either. In November 2007, Cornel West got onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and before a hollering crowd of more than a thousand people, with much arm-­waving and wrist-flapping, along with a certain amount of ass-wagging, …

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Obama’s embrace of gay marriage makes for a spiritual Mother’s Day

When President Obama threw his support behind same-sex marriage, he did something much more than please the members of the LGBT community and the people who love them. He gave hope and encouragement to millions of Americans struggling to do right by their children in unconventional or nontraditional families by implicitly asserting “as a practicing Christian” that using the Bible as …

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The religion and politics of division

Last week, the Christianity police, in the persons of Rick Santorum and Franklin Graham, came forward to discredit the president’s religious beliefs. First, Santorum called President Obama’s theology “phony”; then, on “Morning Joe,” Graham refused to accept Obama into his Christian band of brothers: “He has said he’s a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is.” With rhetoric like this, …

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Believers wonder: Where is the old Obama?

  “We worship an awesome God in the blue states!” That was Barack Obama in 2004, not yet a U.S. senator, at the Democratic National Convention. And for the next four years, he did something extraordinary. He convincingly articulated a set of American values for the center-left. “Values” were not something God gave to Republicans in exchange for their opposition …

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Christians on both sides of budget battle claim to fight for the poor

  After this week’s debt-ceiling deal in Congress, trillions of dollars of spending cuts are on the table. New cuts will sink deep, laying bare the nation’s moral priorities. The tough choices will be left to a new Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. But let’s imagine for a minute that the Christian Lord could pore over the thousand-page federal budget with a …

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One Nation Under God

Powerful new rhetoric on the religious right pits Obama and big government against ‘God’s America’—and promises to galvanize Christians in 2012. On Nov. 30, about a dozen moderate Christian leaders gathered for a meeting in Washington, D.C. Their colleagues on the religious right had been delivering a potent new message about God and country, of fear and domination, that was resonating among …

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